In a blog post today, Google has revealed that it has made some changes in how the company's search and discovery algorithms work. Now things like performance problems, crashes, and overall jank are considered when ranking apps. This is great for consumers, as it encourages developers to pay closer attention to the quality of experience their products present.

These changes are just the most recent in Google's attempts to improve developer attention to performance. A few months ago Google added a new set of Profilers to Android Studio. They allow developers to monitor a number of different metrics in search of increased optimization and efficiency. This was tied to new vitals tools in the Play Console Dashboard, too, that allows for developers to gather and view those same types of metrics from customers.

The new changes in Google Play's ranking should provide the necessary pressure for developers to actually use those tools. If an app doesn't perform well, it might suffer in promotion compared to better-performing apps. It might not make much of a difference in ranking for higher-profile companies with known performance problems, but smaller developers will have to pay a bit more attention now.

If you're a developer, it's probably a good idea to give the full (and short) blog post a read. It has some good links for how to best make use of Google's tools to avoid any penalties as a result of these changes.

Comments

What's wrong with messenger? Tons of options, video chat works well, most people have it compared to Hangouts/Allo/Duo/Whatever. I don't have any hiccups when using it.

IVBela

Read at least the first two sentences of the linked Google blog post. We are talking about performance and quality here.
Messenger (and Facebook too) is the greatest resource hog my phone(s) has ever seen. The app itself is inexcusably huge, eats tons of memory, is slow and unresponsive, just to mention the most important aspects.

MV

The app itself is a hiccup.

Johnny Doe

They're just putting these into consideration but I'm sure popularity is still weighed higher.

Mayoo

At last, PornHub will be on top all the time!

George

performance problems? something something Google Play Services...

Vratislav Jindra

What's wrong with Google Play services? I use them in my apps to get some data from user's Google account, and it works awesome. Sure, sometimes it takes a while to get the result set from Play Services but that for to server latency and internet speed, I guess.

balcobomber25

So most of Google Apps won't be in the top search results?

EarlyMon

Does this mean that live wallpapers with high ratings will stop showing up? Or that when I search for the app name specifically it will come up first?

No? K.

Randroid

"Or that when I search for the app name specifically it will come up first?"

My absolute #1 problem with Play Store search. As a developer, I should be able to put the name of my app into the search box and have it be among the top searches (only possibly under apps that have the same name.) But the way that search currently is, that is not the case.

The worst part is, even giving potential users the EXACT name of my app doesn't allow them to easily find it, which results in possible lost installs because Google (the #1 search company in the world) can't get search right in their mobile store.

I didn't notice the changes of the review they show but I do wish they show more important reviews at the top. Maybe they can do something like having regular reviewers' reviews show up higher in the list.

Randroid

They need a "sort by lowest rating" as well. I like to look at 1-star ratings (even on Amazon and whatnot) to see if they're legit problems or just people bitching about things that don't actually matter. Too many people give an app 1-star because they don't like how it looks, or because there's a typo, or something really stupid like that. But others have legitimate issues with the underlying idea or implementation of the app, and some of those are worth reading.

Google should grade reviewers and consider their value in the ordering of the reviews. We can already vote reviews up or down, but that should be used in a global manner. If one posts reviews regularly and his/her reviews are generally accepted as helpful they should show up closer to the top. Or we could filter on reviews only from B+ or higher grade reviewers.

When I search, I expect my search phrase to be used and a matching named app to come up on top. Not randomly named apps.
What they also need to do is move apps with a last update of a year or more ago down the list, and give us a means of reporting apps that no longer work.
Ratings should give more weighting to the more recent reviews. Too often I find apps that started with 5s but anything recent is 1 or 2. Formerly good apps, not updated or where an API that they used to obtain data had been taken away.

rndusrnm479461

So Pokemon GO will be at the very bottom of the results now?

Randroid

Pokemon Go actually performs extremely well for what it is. Yes, it kills your battery, but that's because it is a very demanding app, and there is not much they can do to change that without completely changing the game. The screen is basically always on (which is the largest battery killer) it is constantly poling your location (which is necessary, given the gameplay) and it reaches out to the server every 10 seconds for updates on pokemon location (which was changed from a much lower number last year, and many players complained when they made that change.) But all of that is actually done in a very efficient way, or else it would be extremely laggy. (Which it still is on my device, but that's because my phone sucks. Everything is laggy on my phone.)